Water reserves in Isaan at critical low

[harness]

And this Super El Nino is forecast to prevail until well into next year.

I was watching a doco on Arizona some years ago and I can remember being impressed that the locals tore up their flower and shrub gardens and replaced them with cactuses and other desert stuff. Not applicable here yet I know but...

I live in a northern, ex rice growing village. Today only five men here know , or at least are tough enough to grow rice. It's on the way out it seems.

The future is Chinese and Japanese, cheap labour factories......chemicals etc..... at least in Lamphun and probably all along the proposed Chinese train line from Nong Khai to the heavily polluted factory zone of Ma Tha Phut in Rayong.

That's the future .....not feeding rice plants with scarce water.

[LivinLOS]

And yet in my part of the north (chiang mai) the water management was told to keep the sluice gates open, to push water out of our reservoirs, to increase flow in the chao praya to help bangkoks water processing.

How about bangkok deal with bangkoks problems and let the north try to deal with its own.

This logic goes far beyond water. Bangkok has 17% of the country's populous and spends 70% of the tax revenue. This is what happens when you have a centralized government. I can remember the floods some years back and all the 7/11 stores shelves were empty. All or most of their product came from Bangkok but the roads were flooded. All areas of Thailand should matter not just the capital.

I guess you meant that the 17% of the population living in greater Bangkok generates (not 'spends') 70% of the tax revenue.

No bangkok gets 70% of the national tax revenue with 10% of the population (depending on if you measure central or outer at +-16%).. And Issan with 30% of the country's population gets 6% of its budget. (source 2010 world bank)

A Bangkok child gets 400% of the spending of an Isaan child on education.

Bangkokians get 17 times the medical expenditure in government hospitals than Issan does. 1,700% !!

Overall per head bangkokians (10% of population) gets 35x the spending, per person, than Issanites (30% of population) gets.. And they wonder why they dont win elections ?? They call the ones getting a fraction as much spent on them as they do from the national budget the ones after handouts !! They preach a sufficiency economy for everyone else. While consuming 35x as much tax revenue per person !!

[swissie]

And yet in my part of the north (chiang mai) the water management was told to keep the sluice gates open, to push water out of our reservoirs, to increase flow in the chao praya to help bangkoks water processing.

How about bangkok deal with bangkoks problems and let the north try to deal with its own.

This logic goes far beyond water. Bangkok has 17% of the country's populous and spends 70% of the tax revenue. This is what happens when you have a centralized government. I can remember the floods some years back and all the 7/11 stores shelves were empty. All or most of their product came from Bangkok but the roads were flooded. All areas of Thailand should matter not just the capital.

May pen rai ! As long as BKK is not directly affected, nothing "will be done". If BKK is affected, 5 minutes before 12, water rationing will be implemented. Nobody will follow this executive order nor will anyone enforce it.

General recommendation will be: Drink Beer, not water. As Marie Antoinette said: "If the people don't have bread, why they don't eat cake?" It worked out nicely for France.

Cheers.

[tuanku]

And yet in my part of the north (chiang mai) the water management was told to keep the sluice gates open, to push water out of our reservoirs, to increase flow in the chao praya to help bangkoks water processing.

How about bangkok deal with bangkoks problems and let the north try to deal with its own.

I think you will find that all the water systems are linked together, you can't manage them in isolation. If the sea water pushes up the Chao Phraya into Bangkok then 11 or 12 million people and all the Bangkok industries are without fresh water. Do you really imagine there would be no knock on effect in Chiang Mai if that were to happen?

So the farmers have to suffer and give up their water and livelihoods, so bangkok can water its golf courses and wash its cars ??

How about some real and actual water preservation in bangkok, instead of the BMA watering its streets to keep the dust down, considering they are literally going to send Thai farmers to bankruptcy to do so.

The idea that bangkok deserves it all and the northerners just have to suffer so bangkok doesnt is frankly offensive.

I agree. I find many things about the power structure in this country offensive. Watering golf courses and gardens, washing cars, Songkran, watering the streets are all poor uses of water in times of scarcity and should be stopped. In a society where people took their social responsibilities seriously, they probably would be. Allowing sea water to contaminate Bangkok's water system is not responsible however and would cause great damage to a large number of ordinary people and important industries. The farmers, unfortunately, are probably shafted whatever happens. The current political system, if that is not to grand a name for it, is hardly designed to help anyone who is rural rather than urban or poor rather than wealthy, so the rural poor are in a hard place. En mass they do have the power to do something about it but things don't seem to be that desperate - yet.